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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28288653">future nostalgia</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/millenialfalcon/pseuds/tachycardiaHorrorshow'>tachycardiaHorrorshow (millenialfalcon)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, F/M, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:47:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,210</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28288653</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/millenialfalcon/pseuds/tachycardiaHorrorshow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the year 2025. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. John Egbert is one of the leading scientists for the National Science Foundation's climate change division and trying to change that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. prologue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>updates every thursday, EST</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Winter was always clear and cold in Boston. The city air was acidic (from the pollution) and crisp (from nature), and made me feel both stagnant and awake. Stale snow, trimmed with black ice at the edges, covered the sidewalks and shrubs lining the street. The few cars still on the road had trickled out of sight, and now the only movement was from the trains, which chugged past irregularly towards the city, fewer trains going outbound along their route. I walked towards the massive intersection, filled with overlapping train track paths and street signs.</p><p>“Where are we going?” </p><p>“We are going to answer your question.” </p><p>“About David, you mean. One of three questions,” she clarified.</p><p>“Er, right,” I felt a wave of anxiety lap over my mind. “It’s just a bit further. I’m surprised you’ve never been here.”</p><p>Anticipation nipped at my face and filled my stomach. I clenched my jaw as we got closer. The ground sloped upward, meeting with a path into the woods nearby, and a staircase going down towards the water. The reservoir glittered in the evening sun, a pool of pink and purple holding a mouthful of precious stones. The bellies of the clouds were streaked with coral. Very few people were walking along the footpath. I turned to the left towards the woods. Rose paused and admired the reservoir before following me.</p><p>“It was up here. There’s a bench, then…” I trailed off. Rose gave me enough time to try to think of something to say and fail. </p><p>“Was this a place you two went often?”</p><p>“Yeah, in the warm weather growing up. I guess it was a nice spot until the accident.”</p><p>Rose nodded. She never liked discussing work in public, in fear of someone else listening in. The government tracks us, of course, but I have nothing to hide. They have plenty on us already.</p><p>It wasn’t this big deal to be an ecologist or environmental scientist in the 2000s. But after the 2010s, the situation on earth became much more intense—from global catastrophe, such as irreversible dramatic changes in climate, a plague; to politics, with intensified violence in society against its most vulnerable and disenfranchised. After many places were afflicted by flooding and fires, populations were shifted, with populations losing pockets, from insects to agriculture to humans. Eventually there was a new opposition party, born out of the powerlessness and anguish, to demand change—environmental terrorism.</p><p>I could see the blanket of red pine needles and over patchy grass, reconstructed by my mind from years earlier—me and Dave, huddling together and drinking whiskey. I could see snow angels, the perfect impression of Dave’s body, his dark clothes, his skin and hair as white as the snow.</p><p>I felt the ground beneath through the ice, the softened wood and decaying leaves. In the distance I could see the sun reflecting off the snow, lighting little fires in the white. I ground my teeth. Being near here always made me uneasy and anticipatory, as if I were waiting for something to startle me. As they moved closer I could see someone had cleared off the park bench, its dark, parallel lines jarring against the natural branches of fir and oak. My eyes moved up towards the rocky outcrop, further forward, and snapped to focus on a clicking noise—</p><p>In my peripheral I saw the gravestone had a large blue and white wreath hanging over it, frost-bitten and translucent with slow decay from sitting outside, with smaller bundles of flowers on a small bench in front. I was fixated on a person, sitting in the snow by the grave, a large plume of smoke coming from them. Tobacco and marijuana cut through the air, the familiar smell flooding my senses and stunning me. I felt my blood, pounding in my ears, my heart trembling instead of beating. I stammered,</p><p>“Dave?”</p><p>The man lifted his head slightly. A beat. Nothing as he stands up, ice crushing softly against the frozen earth. He doesn’t look at Rose and I as he leaves, and I don’t try to stop him.</p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br/>
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________</p><p>I haven’t seen him in three years. I was planning on keeping it that way.</p><p>The holiday festivities spun around me in a dizzying social carousel. I had trouble focusing the rest of the day, nervously checking my hand phone to see if Rose had texted me about some revelation. Instead, nothing—emails, work texts, pleasantries. I checked the news, nothing. No mention of David Strider, traitor of the United States of America, returning home to face righteous capital punishment, or leaving Russia at all after successfully seeking asylum.</p><p>I slipped away from the warm lighting and laughter inside to the back porch. It’s cold and a little wet from the melting snow. My wine felt warm in comparison to the cold air, but I was more at peace shivering here than I did indoors. The dark woods behind my home are not truly endless, but they let you imagine you’re farther away from the city. Sometimes I imagine myself in the mountains and forests, far, far away from the wreckage of humanity I desperately try to fix, as if some untouched area of the world would be preserved from the climate destruction. </p><p>Behind my closed eyes I could see Dave sitting by Jade’s grave, close enough to smell the spliffs and flowers. I could have touched him. But what could I call Dave now? Since our childhood, the world had taken a turn. If Dave and I were not on opposite sides of the same movement, maybe things would be different. If they were not star-crossed enemies of the government, each a dissident to the other’s ideals—if they were entirely different people. Again, losing myself in hypotheticals. </p><p>“Stupid,” I muttered bitterly. At this rate I’ll waste another night on this. </p><p>I went back inside. My glasses fogged from the heat. I swiped a bottle of Cabernet from the kitchen and went upstairs, leaving the neighborhood gathering behind. It was time to get to work. </p><p>Why has Dave Strider returned to Boston?</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Year of the Dole Banana (2016)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>this is john's first year at university. he's got a couple hard classes, but one of them is the reason he decided to study infectious diseases at all. another noteworthy course, signals and systems, is taught by a phd student, dave.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hello i apologize for the delay ;;<br/>off to a great start, 2021. hope you enjoy. i am taking this in the direction of a more technical/philosophical work but obviously that will involve some rated R shit</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Cambridge and Boston were nothing like the rest of Massachusetts—rich with history and ornate buildings clashing with modern structures with glass and steel made me overly conscious of my cheap shirts, flannels with patches, and worn sneakers. Although I was only a few hours drive outside of the city, the area was practically alien. I didn’t frequent the Prudential with my friends in high school, trying to sneak into bars in the area, nor had I taken public transportation regularly growing up. The amount of car exhaust was overwhelming, enough for me to buy a few cloth masks within days of moving. In my emotionally delicate state, I would frequently feel homesick, yearning for the time I was a nobody in my small town—thus an excellent distraction was the fear of failing my father and flunking out of school.</p><p>You could say I’m very strongly driven by anxiety.</p><p>The first week of the semester I had torrents of emotions I am unashamed of recalling; when you’ve been uprooted from your home, sent to an unfamiliar location with new responsibilities, and every surface you own is covered in the debris of moving—structured chaos, deconstructed cardboard, tape sticking to itself in rivulets—you get a little overwhelmed, and quite sad. It was one of the moments I reflected on a new kind of difficulty, first-hand feeling what the word ‘resilience’ meant. Persisting despite wanting to leave. I would take walks and listen to lecture recordings to study, exploring the city and trying to find the beauty in it. I began drawing again--a hobby that I had neglected since I began preparing for university in my third year of high school--often finding inspiration in the greenspaces and architecture on MIT campus.  </p><p>Now, I must admit this fact, which I often lie about in interviews, when I am asked by star-struck children, or even students still in the thick of academic training--when I decided I wanted to be a scientist, it wasn’t driven by a burning desire to save the world. In fact, the idea of becoming a researcher had never occurred to me until I had reached my university, simply because the concept was far too abstract--discovering something new about the natural process of the world sounded incredibly difficult. At the time I had a slight inclination towards medicine, although engineering appeared the most practical to me; we know plenty of things already, and learning how to make advancements in technology which could directly help humans sounded like the most effective use of my time. However, my narrow world-view changed when I read a book about viruses that scared the absolute fuck out of me.</p><p>It was titled, ‘The Hot Zone,’ and it was the first assigned reading for my infectious diseases course in college. The class was taught by Professor Jane Crocker, a physician and a scientist who ran a molecular biology, primarily clinically-driven laboratory at my university. Truthfully, I had carelessly chosen this class to fulfill my writing requirement and had not given much thought to its implications for the human race.</p><p>I am absolutely certain Professor Crocker thought I was an idiot the first few weeks of the semester, with my lack of preparedness somehow tangling me in quite the extraordinarily complex situation. I had signed up for the course despite taking none of the prerequisites, such as Immunology (for science majors) or Epidemiology (for humanities majors, which focused on the public health standpoint). I had never read a scientific article in my life and had no idea how to interpret the results, clearly reflected in my first quiz, and my little knowledge on fundamental molecular biology gave be a terrible foundation. My confidence was thoroughly shaken, but out of sheer stubbornness I did not drop the course, as I was taken by how Professor Crocker tied scientific articles to the human experience.</p><p>“The co-evolution and adaptation between viruses and humans is one of the main focuses of The Hot Zone. However, it does not portray this adaptation as a zero-sum biological arms race—a crime many pop-sci novels commit. We first read this in part one, chapter six:”</p><p>&gt; They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.</p><p>“Clearly he is discussing the virus. And although there are multiple segments that follow this throughout, there is a segment in part four, chapter one, where Preston explicitly writes about the Kinshasa Highway, and how it acts as a vehicle for transmission; the double edged sword of human innovation, and how our curiosity is often on the brink of hubris.”</p><p>&gt; The paving of Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.</p><p>“So, how do we make decisions about actions, such as vaccines against viruses, that might do more harm than good? We will first look at the vaccine development for dengue virus, or DENV.”</p><p>I had never heard of dengue virus prior to this course, so it was a surprise to me there was an outbreak of dengue in Texas a decade ago. From the assigned reading, I learned it was mosquito-borne, part of the flavivirus family, and deadly in many tropical areas. 100 million people are affected annually. These statistics, I learned, have an interesting effect of coding the horror behind numbers; it allowed us to keep talking about human lives despite the dismal nature of it all, by framing it around probabilities, in terms of comparisons between other diseases, population pyramids, hospitalizations instead of peoples’ families, life-long disabilities, avoidable and changeable realities.</p><p>However, Professor Crocker was different. She emphasized both the technical consequences as well as how this would impact a society or a country—the problems solved in the research were palpable, they had faces and names, and could very well be us. “This disease disproportionately affects children. The severe form of the disease is a leading cause of hospitalization and death in the Philippines, Thailand, and most countries in Central and South America. So, you can imagine the impact this may have on a country—“</p><p>“—for the record, every country is perpetually in some kind of debt, because it’s expecting the money that will come in. If the younger generation’s population decreases sharply, then we are not able to replace the same members of society in the workforce. As the older generation ages and relies on the government for support the debt that the country is in will increase, because it is no longer making as much money in the future as it expected, based on the expected population. Our society is vulnerable to these population fluctuations for this reason.”</p><p>“Now, some of you may be thinking, if it is borne from mosquitos, a simple solution one may think of is culling mosquitos, or sterilizing them. However, this is a poor option due to urbanization, but a mix of other factors play in this; degrading sanitation, financial resource competition, pesticide resistance, airline travel, population increase. There are quite a lot of mosquitos, and there are a lot of other factors that are allowing diseases to spread much more easily than mosquitos. Changing the ecosystem around mosquitos seems risky, and may have unknown consequences; it’s possible those mosquitos have a very rich and fulfilling life doing other things, like pollination, pest control, just being a food source so there aren’t a bunch of bats and birds trying to attack us for food… and we are just a blip in the mosquito’s life.”</p><p>It was a problem that seemed impossible, and yet our future likely depended on it. The likelihood for us to have a massive health disaster was quite high. The pace of research the last 50 years was also exciting to me—there were lifetime’s of work on different parts of this beautiful, intricate puzzle. Within these microscopic structures, humans have the potential to understand the mechanisms of life and death. I spent much of my time reading, nothing out of the usual for me growing up. As a first-year living on his own in the dormitories, I did not have the initial experience being paired with a stranger and having to play nice. Instead, though, I felt incredibly lonely. Often I would lie on the quad reading, enjoying the sweet fall air, still warm with the last touches of summer. My other courses were not nearly as interesting—Circuits and electronics, Algorithms, and Signals and Systems.</p><p>The natural predilection to enjoying the syntax of mathematics provides a main benefit: computational skills, such as coding in different programming languages or understanding the relationship between low-level hardware electronic systems and high-level software systems, come quite easily. Unfortunately, not many things in the world but computers work like this, so my skills are quite narrow. The bridge between coursework and research, however, did not fall into my natural talent. Although I had a good grasp of the theoretical and the practical in toy models, such as the typical examples in physics courses—atoms decaying for quantum, balls on strings spinning, capacitors in series—I lacked experience in the hands-on, and thus searching for what is known and unknown to lay the foundations of an experiment was new to me.</p><p>We began our laboratory and discussion sections during the third week of courses, which added a few hours of coursework for each class. Unexpectedly I had been neglecting my Signals seminars (a combined session that was either laboratory or discussion depending on the syllabus). It was Friday afternoon, on a nice clear, crisp day, when I first met Dave Strider.</p><p>To: John Egbert (jegbert@mit.edu)<br/>
From: Dave Strider (strider@mit.edu)<br/>
Subject: missed seminar</p><p>john,<br/>
this is your tf dave<br/>
hi nice to meet you<br/>
you did not come to the seminar this week there’s a quiz with your name on it and a pset<br/>
the seminars are mandatory if you fail the seminar portion of the class you will fail the course<br/>
also theyre like way better than lecture<br/>
you have two options whichever works best for you<br/>
(1) either come to any discussion section of your choice which I am leading (you can look on my.mit.edu) next week see the attached documents for what you missed, i need the quiz back (it doesnt count for anything) and the pset by next discussion<br/>
(2) email me which section you want and do same as above<br/>
(3) come to my office 46-5133 from the main st side itll take less than two minutes and we can figure it out in the flesh if that’s easier<br/>
i am in the office or the lab across the hall every day (outside of class) 8am-6pm<br/>
let me know</p><p>dave</p><p>I sucked in a large breath. I had never been remotely close to failing a course before, and my eyes practically glazed over the rest of the email. I had passed building 46 before, although I had not been inside, and had a vague idea of where it was from my current location. I turned off my computer and got up from my usual location in Eastman Court, walking to Building 56 and then down the footpath to Vassar Street, then made a left onto Main Street as instructed. I opened the front door and entered 46.</p><p>All of the surfaces were shiny—glass walls and smooth clean floors, bright lights and a few potted plants. Suspended from the ceiling were tiny gold sculptures on thin wire, sparkling in the light. I gazed upward, entranced for a moment before jogging up the rest of the stairs and heading straight for the elevator. As soon as the door opened I stepped in, colliding with someone.</p><p>I sent her tipping backward, dropping a large file of papers. I quickly bent over, gathering the sheets ungracefully, and handed them to her.</p><p>“I’m so sorry.”</p><p>She shook her head and smiled, “it’s alright, it happens.” We exchanged an awkward stare, my eyes meeting her green ones, and I admired the way her round glasses framed her face. She stood to leave the elevator.</p><p>“Well, have a nice day.”</p><p>I nodded and pressed the close door button.</p><p>Different sections of the building seemed to have different types of laboratories—artificial intelligence to wet labs were all here. The fifth floor was also split, but most of 5133 to 5150 seemed to be the same laboratory. Room 5133 had multiple smaller rooms, only one of which had the door open. The outside label read, ‘David R. Strider, Ph.D. Candidate, Biological Engineering, Brain and Cognitive Sciences.’</p><p>I paused for a moment outside of his door, inhaling deeply to calm himself. I should apologize first.</p><p>I knocked on the doorframe with three smart taps, but the man seated did not turn his head. He was wearing black sunglasses despite being indoors, with large studio headphones on his head. I glanced over him; his skin was fair, and his hair, a shade of light gray, was long enough to touch the beginning of his collared maroon shirt. Most of the teaching fellows for my courses wore t-shirts, so I suddenly felt self conscious of my attire. Before him were three screens, two positioned with landscape view where he appeared to be coding in Python on one screen and Matlab on another, and the third screen flipped portrait style where there was a scientific article open with a terminal window running something, clearly discernible with its green text on black. The third screen faced me clearly, and I could read the figure projected: Learned movement kinematics recover spontaneously after motor cortex lesions.</p><p>“Excuse me,” I said meekly, sounding smaller than I planned. Still nothing. I took another step closer--a mistake--and he immediately turned his head. </p><p>“Christ,” he breathed, pulling his headphones off. </p><p>“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you. I got your email. I’m also sorry about the discussion section. I’m here to schedule my new one,” I spoke a little too quickly, and instead of sincere I sounded as though I was reading a list. I saw a brief flash of a smile on Dave’s face, but it quickly dropped.</p><p>“Right. You’re John Egbert. Pleasure,” he extended his hand. I took it and tried my best to give a firm handshake.</p><p>“I’m Dave Strider.” </p><p>I nodded, “nice to meet you.” Dave turned back around and continued typing.</p><p>“Feel free to sit. You are signed up for the discussion section on Thursday at 4pm to 5pm. Does this work for you still?”</p><p>I walked to the table in his office space. The room was nice, in a suite with a few other offices, but had its own door and window, far nicer than what I expected for a graduate student. “Yes, that’s fine. Sorry about that again. Did I miss anything?”</p><p>“There was a quiz, which will not count towards your grade but is an assessment that you have met the prerequisites for this course. You can take it now or you can take it home with you and bring it to the next discussion. There is also a pset,” Dave pulled open and rummaged around in a particularly disorganized drawer, partially full of hanging file organizers, plastic boxes labeled ‘Fine Science Tools,’ and red cardboard boxes labeled ‘Thorlabs lab snacks.’ He handed me a single page and a thicker packet, stapled together.</p><p>“I can take it now,” I glanced at the page--most of it was, I think, calculus 2. It was not unheard of for a first-year to be taking Signals and Systems, although it is out of the ordinary. I had tested out of several of the traditional introductory courses, such as Differential Equations, Programming skills (not to be confused with Programming, which I was unable to skip), and introduction to electrical engineering and computer science. </p><p>Dave had written my name for me on both pages, in fine red ink, likely with a 0.38 tip. His handwriting was a mix of cursive script and print, with a consistent angle towards the right. I was never able to write in script. I glanced at Dave, who in turn, glanced at me. “Something wrong?”</p><p>I shook my head, “I’m done my quiz.”  </p><p>I picked up my backpack and walked over to the other side of the office, where Dave was sitting. I placed the sheet in his outstretched hand. I was back to looking at his computer monitor open to a publication, memorizing details that would assist me looking it up later: Kawai, Neuron, 2015, motor movements in rats, motor cortex and learning. He looked at it for a few seconds, maybe 3 quarter notes, before saying, “everything’s correct.” </p><p>The outlined part of our interaction was over, but I for whatever reason decided to continue talking to Dave. I blame my new interest in scientific research primarily, but admittedly I was a little lonely, and had not had a lengthy conversation with someone since school began.</p><p>“What are you reading? If you don’t mind me asking.”</p><p>“A recent paper from Harvard. Basically after you’ve learned something, one of the areas you need to learn it, motor cortex, becomes disposable. It suggests how rats learn a motor skill.” I struggled to imagine how this would be set up, let alone how they determined a brain area was disposable.</p><p>“So they taught an animal to do something? Like move around?”</p><p>“The animals were taught to pull on a lever.”</p><p>My head was still spinning. “But how?”</p><p>Dave smirked. “Good question. Usually there is some manual behavioral training, but this lab’s got a live-in facility. Rats train themselves to do tasks, usually they’re timing-based. Imagine you have to press a game console button with the right gap between presses, it's like that. Time is something even rats know, maybe not by the same notation.”</p><p>I nodded. I never thought about how rats, or other animals, would conceptualize time. “Do you study something like this too?”</p><p>Dave nodded, “yes, except in songbirds. It’s a similar idea, though--birds teach themselves how to sing, we can modulate what they learn, and study how their brain’s activity patterns change as they learn.” </p><p>It was unclear to me how a neuroscientist became my Signals Teaching Fellow, but my interest was piqued. Apparently it was written all over my face, since Dave opened his email and replied to our chain with the paper attached. “Since you seem into it, I just sent the paper to you.”</p><p>“Thanks,” I smiled, until I caught myself grinning a bit too broadly and stopped abruptly. “Well, see you at discussion,” I said. </p><p>Dave nodded, “looking forward to it.”</p><p>As I left Building 46, my phone buzzed. Dave’s email read, </p><p>to read at your leisure<br/>
feel free to share your thoughts</p><p>dave</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. The Year of the Dole Banana (2016)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>john meets his lab partner, rose, who works in prof. crocker's lab. he hears back from dave, who gives him a bunch of info about Risa Kawai's paper, and inspires him. </p><p>john, our narrator, also provides some perspective on what the future holds for him.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hi, i do not plan to abandon this, ive had this idea for a while. but, i am an actual soon-to-be-phd-student, and thus my schedule for writing and updating this is kinda wonky. apologies. </p><p>we are getting to the point of the story where the groundwork has been mostly laid out, and our main characters are milling in. there will be some good times for the next few chapters, and then we will hit the point of the story where Shit Goes Down. more on that later.</p><p>hope you enjoy. if you would like a copy of the paper that is referenced by this chapter (there is a paywall) please let me know and i can get it for you.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The end of September brought cooler days, and soon I was wearing sweaters or coats to class. I still kept to my routine of working outside, but also began frequenting the nearby coffee shops. I enjoyed the option to watch people when I intermittently paused during my work sessions. I am not adventurous with my order--I almost exclusively drink hot black coffee, due to being overwhelmed by the menu and being prone to frequent bouts of idling out in front of the cashier from overthinking. Besides, nothing is better than having a flaky, sweet pastry clash right into bitter coffee.</p><p>I was used to the cold growing up, so I still ran up by the esplanade, holding onto the warmth that was sure to disappear for months. I found the merciless clockwork of northeastern seasons comforting.</p><p>In my free time I would do extra scientific literature reading, although with seminars starting up I knew my hobby of scientific journaling would soon be shelved. It undoubtedly helped my grade in Professor Crocker’s course. Another saving grace was having a laboratory partner.</p><p>My laboratory instructor was a woman named Meenah Peixes, who was a graduate student in Professor Crocker’s research lab. She had long dreads, which were pulled back for laboratory safety. She had assigned us benches to find our partner. I was paired with another first-year, Rose Lalonde. Rose was dressed nicely under her lab coat, with a smart sweater vest and corduroy pants, a contrast to the usual casual attire most students donned. Our first lab class was a brief review of safety instructions and going over a few standard protocols. At one point Rose was cold-called by Meenah to demonstrate proper tube-handling procedure--using a wire loop and a bunsen burner--to make inoculations for agar pour plates. </p><p>There was a short quiz about safety and a prelab we were assigned to complete prior to the next lab class, two days from now. When class was dismissed I took off my laboratory coat and asked Rose, “could you give me your email?”</p><p>“Sure. It’s rosell@mit.edu,” she walked with me out of the room, down the stairs of the biology labs. The halls had a few undergraduates milling about, but there was never an overwhelming amount of people from my experience, likely due to the small class sizes. I wrote down her email in my notepad. </p><p>“Have you taken a class similar to this one? Seems like you knew what you were doing back there.”</p><p>Rose nodded, “yes, I also work in Professor Crocker’s lab.”</p><p>“Oh. That makes sense. How is it?” I am totally out of my league. To think there were first-years that had already landed research positions was a surprise to me. But here she was--doing the exact thing that seemed so intangible, trying to find out something new about the world.</p><p>“It’s fun. I like it. Nice people who work hard, and we have some interesting collaborators.” </p><p>I nodded. “I’d really like to hear more about it--” I was a little embarrassed to admit my lack of experience directly, but I continued despite feeling my face heat up, “--I never read a scientific article or like, thought about science as something I could be working on until I came here and heard Professor Crocker lecture, so I’m interested.” </p><p>Rose smiled, “sure, how about we do some work together? I’ve got quite a few assignments this week and I’ve been looking for an accountability partner. And we can take breaks and chat about science. I’m pretty flexible, I usually go into the lab early on the weekends though.”</p><p>“That sounds great!” Why did I always sound so eager? “How’s tomorrow night, after dinner? I’m in 3C at Simmons, I have a dorm to myself that’s got a nice table to work at, and there are places to work together around the building too.”</p><p>“That works. Maybe texting would be easier?”</p><p>“Oh, yeah, you’re probably right.” Rose already had her phone out and handed it to me.</p><p>“Cool. Well, I have a very exciting discussion section for Systems Neuroscience, so I’ll see you,” Rose gave a little wave with just the tips of her fingers and walked towards building 46. I nodded, watching her walk away for a little too long before I started to head back to Simmons Hall.</p><p>The days were shrinking before me, but soon the sunsets would be beautiful streaks of brilliant pink and purple painting the sky, gray clouds colored into beautiful pastels. I looked forward to the decay of autumn each year, mostly for the serene quiet that met me at dawn and dusk for my usual runs, the cold stillness that fills the air. When I arrived at my dormitory I put my belongings down, and reviewed my notepad’s contents. I liked to organize my thoughts while they were still fresh before taking a break--I made a list of the things I had to do next, with where I had left off written nearby. </p><p>I had finished an email to Dave with my thoughts about Risa Kawai’s paper. It was Monday--it had only been two days since our interaction, and our discussion section was later this week. For some reason I felt motivation to send this to him sooner than later. I had also looked him up several times, and felt a little creepy about how much I was thinking about him. I ate something quick for dinner and went on my usual run, showered, and returned to my desk to work.</p><p>Despite my best efforts I was unable to concentrate on the more pressing tasks at hand, choosing music to listen to for a full five minutes, then failing to read a single paragraph for another ten minutes. So, I gave up and started looking at the Kawai paper again, giving what I drafted to Dave one last read-through. I scrunched up my face and bit my lower lip the entire time and clicked on send.</p><p>Finally. My brain was quieter now.</p><p>---------</p><p>I had managed a full night of honest work, and decided to treat myself to some video games. My latest obsession was a first-person shooter set in major US cities--New York City, D.C., Boston, Austin, etc.--at the end of a somewhat post-apocalyptic situation, a pandemic outbreak coupled with a political attack. It encouraged playing with others, as most quests were easier when you had a co-op sort of thing going on, and it often paired me with users on my current map that were completing the same quests as me.</p><p>I had left off in Boston. Most evenings I was randomly paired with new individuals, but lately I had been running into the same player repeatedly around this time, usually in Boston. They were a far better player than me--most of their guns had a special ability where the bullets explode on contact--so I often wondered what incentivized them to work with me, as opposed to another, more higher ranking player.</p><p>organizedMold: hey. I’m just finishing up. Should we move towards Brooklyn?<br/>
opalFire: sure</p><p>It was nice to have someone familiar to play games with; I had never met this individual and I doubt I ever will, but we had this unspoken understanding that we’d be online together on certain days. I was wary to extend our relationship (whatever that would entail--sending a friend request that would prolong our contact) because I was content with what we had already.</p><p>opalFire: oh shit<br/>
opalFire: we might not b able to do this yet ive been here before n got totaled<br/>
organizedMold: Huh? What’s wrong?<br/>
opalFire: incoming</p><p>As soon as my character stepped forward, there was a massive rain of bullets. My shield shattered but I was somehow still alive and able to take cover. The plot of the game goes: there is a Resistance Army who you are mostly going against, where the Resistance Army is trying to steal supplies/cause general chaos. Your character is aware that the bleak situation (again, massive pandemic and political breakdown) has a lot of people without resources, and that the government has fallen short several times prior to the world going to mostly shit, but nonetheless are trying to contain the resistance army, distribute supplies, and address why some areas have increased violence and deaths than others. </p><p>organizedMold: Looks like this is a plot point. Do you think we can’t take them?<br/>
opalFire: i mean we can try but i think this is where the pandemic subplot intensifies so after we beat them it gets worse</p><p>I wasn’t sure what opal meant, but I had already been firing while he was replying to me. Opal tended to prefer being a sniper, but his character was quite good with melee attacks as well. </p><p>opalFire: bro youre shooting like an AI come on<br/>
organizedMold: you may not like it but this is peak performance!</p><p>Sure enough, after we had defeated the ~15 enemy characters we got to a plot video. We were 4 blocks from a major hospital, which had been housing quarantined patients. The Resistance Army had broken into the hospital to steal supplies and instead of finding soldiers or anything worth stealing, they discovered patients and soldiers alike had been turned into zombies.</p><p>organizedMold: oh shit<br/>
organizedMold: We are totally fucked.</p><p>My character had about 10% of his health points left, and only a hundred bullets. We had some time to loot boxes before the wave of zombies flooded Flatbush Avenue and headed towards us in Downtown Brooklyn. I tried to pick up as many items as I could, then looked for elevated land to try and make some kills from afar. Opal was already one step ahead of me as usual--they were scaling a building to get on a balcony.</p><p>opalFire: btw they can climb up so after a certain point you just gotta knife em</p><p>My body was shaking with anticipation. Frankly if such a situation ever arose I’m sure I’d shake so much I would drop my gun and accidentally shoot myself. My character luckily does not suffer from being a Huge Dingus and was able to climb up a building on the opposite side of the street; this way I could help Opal if the crowd of zombies started overwhelming him. </p><p>I threw a couple of grenades and narrowly avoided being shot at (luckily their aim sucks), but eventually I ran out of ammo and we were nowhere close to being done. </p><p>opalFire: how are you doing on shots<br/>
organizedMold: I’m basically out--I feel like we need to upgrade stuff and stock up before trying this.<br/>
opalFire: gg</p><p>I sighed. Bitter defeat.</p><p>-------------</p><p>As I was getting ready for bed, I saw Dave replied to my email.</p><p> </p><p>To: John Egbert (jegbert@mit.edu)<br/>
From: Dave Strider (strider@mit.edu)<br/>
Subject: Re: kawai et al<br/>
john,<br/>
youve got a lot of questions for someone who doesnt study neuro</p><p>&gt; How do you tell different neurons apart? Do they all do different things?<br/>
you can tell by their waveforms see attached images 1 and 2 for examples<br/>
they basically all do different complicated ass things depending on where they are and what they encode genetically<br/>
there are excitatory and inhibitory yeah but like some of them have some garbled sad excuse of an acronym pumping out more than others (molecules) and thats how it like helps learning and shit or controls attention etc.<br/>
it really depends on what youre looking at very few one size fits alls around here<br/>
the computer scientists will disagree but DO NOT listen to them theyre full of shit</p><p>&gt; If you wanted to make a rat like do something (like reach and grab) where could you send electricity down to make it do it?<br/>
brainstem very likely lots of europeans working on this rn check silvia arber if you want<br/>
depends though like if you want to just control it that’s one thing but the way we control our bodies isnt a unidirectional command its more like a feedback loop like we say go touch this and then after we feel it we might apply more pressure or like apply less pressure<br/>
i think i personally often fail to recognize how complex these problems or experiments truly are because i often dont realize how complex simple things are that have enabled me to learn </p><p>&gt; Does this work mean that different parts of the brain are important for stages of the learning, memory consolidation, and memory retrieval process?<br/>
yes but like not just this paper says that more like this agrees with the existing body of work from the last 80 years about motor learning<br/>
memory is kind of a hot topic and also its amorphous there are people looking at the hippocampus --btw thats the wrong place to look for motor stuff imo--to determine neural correlates of time and space etc. which is a different kind of memory than muscle memory<br/>
but no brain area is an island its far more likely that there is a system-wide process going on that spans several areas and all of these areas together control and modulate learning and memory<br/>
for example there is other work on how we pay attention because we dont just learn shit via diffusion we have to really be alert and interested and these states of ‘arousal’ are important just like if youve ever learned a language or an instruments you have states where you are actively learning and actively performing (such as trying to not make any mistakes and testing yourself)<br/>
these states appear to be important for learning across animal species </p><p>My eyes flew across my screen, reading as quickly as I could and repeatedly over the email. Each answer drew me to another question, but I preferred consuming Dave’s words again over trying to form words for my thoughts. I fell into my bed, first with my limbs outstretched and holding my phone over my head, then curling into a more comfortable position on my side. Maybe we could get together to dream up ideas. My face flushed at the thought. Here I was, already imagining having conversations with Dave. </p><p>For some of my questions he answered with short descriptions of papers, author last names and dates of publication, but more frequently it was less than that and just names of laboratories or countries where the research was being conducted. This work was different than Professor Crocker's research, which was more preoccupied with disease and clinical trials, preventative measures as well as ways to treat and improve patient outcomes. Instead, this work was less direct, and more pure in nature; discovering something foundational, that would one day lay the framework for future studies that reinstate motor function in patients with spinal cord injuries or have difficulty learning motor movements. Instead of solving problems they were instead trying to better understand the problems.</p><p> </p><p>Subject: Re: Kawai et al<br/>
Hi, Dave. Thank you so much for your thorough and insightful replies.<br/>
If you don’t mind, could you tell me about what you are working on for your thesis?<br/>
And, are there opportunities for undergraduates to study the brain and make computational models of them?</p><p>Thanks,<br/>
John</p><p> </p><p>I paused. Was this really what I wanted to say? I stroked my thumb against the side of my screen and accidentally hit send. My eyes opened wide and my stomach lurched--ah, fuck. I supposed it served me right, for obsessively looking at my email at midnight. </p><p>Before I could put my phone down on my bedside table, it buzzed. I quickly sat up and unlocked my screen. It was Dave.</p><p> </p><p>john my thesis is a pile of garbage that is much more easily explained in person<br/>
frankly i want to only have to write it once and then absolve myself of it<br/>
if you really think you want to subject yourself to such torture as having a phd candidate basically out the door telling you about a 5-year-long failed marriage then fine but we will do it off the cuff<br/>
and yes there are ways for ugrads to do comp neuro especially at mit </p><p>whenever is best for you feel free to swing by my office again to find a time to chat</p><p>d</p><p> </p><p>My heart fluttered in my chest with excitement. A scientist wanted to talk to me--mostly willingly--about their work! Exhilaration was a wave over me, and I was trembling, barely able to hold my phone. Now, you must bear with me here, and recognize I was a starry-eyed young adult, now presented with this fantastic prospect of discovering new phenomena about the natural world, and the human brain, no less--one of the most complex yet ordinary things available to examine. There was a potential opportunity for me, a young nobody from a small town where hardly anyone leaves, to have a spot in a laboratory and be paid to think and solve these big questions. </p><p>There was something about Dave Strider that drew me in too, but at the time I did not realize it. His descriptions of scientific research, his ease in referencing past work and high-level abstractions to take from studies, as well as determining directions for new work, all came from an endless curiosity. For a while I thought of him as a mentor figure and confidante, but in reality I had fallen deeply for him. And, he knew it too, after a certain point we both were very aware and complicit. </p><p>I never realized falling in love with someone could ruin your life.</p>
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